Customer research offers insights into the drop in financial product usage in Mexico.

> Posted by Pablo Antón-Diaz, Research Manager, CFI

Fish market on San Gregario Street in Xochimilco, a southeastern municipality of Mexico City, one of the places we visited for our user research.

According to the Global Findex, the percentage of adults in Mexico who are saving money at a formal institution plunged from 15 percent to 10 percent in just the past three years—despite financial inclusion strategies enacted by the government. This steep decline in usage of savings accounts came as a surprise, and hit close to home for me as a Mexican. This trend is a cause for concern, and it’s also a call to action. At Accion, we took this as an opportunity to listen to the people we’d like to see benefit from financial services. With support of MetLife Foundation, we wanted to understand why fewer people were saving in banks, what products and services people were using, and who was providing those services if it wasn’t formal institutions.

To get answers about what people in Mexico want from their financial service providers, I recently traveled home to Mexico City as part of a team of researchers. We listened to small merchants map out their entire financial lives—their motivations, goals and aspirations, how they feel about various types of financial services, the strategies they use to stay financially healthy, and more.

Our biggest surprise? The individuals we talked with know about and can access a lot of financial products—they just aren’t using them.

Nearly 3,000 top athletes from 92 countries are converging on PyeongChang, South Korea to ski, skate, sled, and curl their way to Olympic gold and glory. In addition to medals, some athletes will walk away with lucrative sponsorships. But others will return to part-time jobs, unemployment, modest stipends, and other financial situations that don’t make it on the front of a Wheaties box.

Unfortunately, gold, silver, and bronze don’t always translate to enough green for athletes to stay solvent. While medals often come with cash prizes — a gold medal will net a U.S. competitor $37,500 — these awards are only for a handful of individuals in each sport, and they pale in comparison to the funds needed to become a world-class contender. The prices of training, equipment, travel, healthcare, and other expenses add up for those competing at a global level. The high costs become particularly pronounced when you consider the increased likelihood of injuries, the difficulty of holding a full-time job while on a rigorous training schedule, and the fact that most sports only have a narrow window of time when athletes can compete in their prime.

Patel, 62, father of two, spends an hour learning how to use mobile money wallet A from his daughter. The interface, navigations and services offered are all quite new to him. The next day, he tries to pay for a taxi but finds the taxi provider only accepts mobile money wallet B. He’s quite confident he should be able to use wallet B as the knowledge of how to use A is still fresh in his mind. However, he struggles with navigating the new platform and is unable to locate certain payment options. He’s also apprehensive to try out different keys as he wants to be careful not to transfer money incorrectly. Giving up, Patel pays in cash and waits for his daughter to return home to teach him how to use mobile money wallet B.

Mavis Wanczyk, a staff member at Mercy Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts and a mother of two, recently became a multi-millionaire, revealing herself as the $758.7 million Powerball jackpot winner – the largest individual winner ever. Wanczyk quit her job of 32 years less than 24 hours later.

Reflecting on her decision, Wanczyk remarks, “I was just there to buy it, for just luck. Just go in, buy a scratch ticket, and say maybe it’s me, maybe it won’t be me. It’s just a chance, a chance I had to take.”

The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in over 292 million. In order to purchase all of the possible combinations, an individual would need to spend $584,402,676 on tickets. You are about 100,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning at some point in your lifetime than you are to hit this particular jackpot.

Around the world today, financial service providers, technology entrepreneurs and policy makers are engaged in building a financial system that reaches out to previously excluded people, such as lower income people, very small businesses, rural dwellers, and women. Although this work is carried out in the name of the consumer, all too often, scant attention is paid to the real needs and desires consumers and very small enterprise owners have.

With that in mind, here is a thought experiment. A thought experiment is an “exercise of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things.” The question for this experiment is this:

Imagine that consumers were the creators of the inclusive finance system. What would such a system look like?

> Posted by Hannah McCandless, Program Support Associate, Village Enterprise

Through its one-year graduation program, Village Enterprise provides business and savings training, access to savings groups, seed capital, and mentoring to rural East Africans living in extreme poverty. The program combines these grassroots interventions with linkages to financial institutions, increasing the financial capability of the extreme poor. In the second part of this series, Village Enterprise reflects on some of the learning gained through these interventions, focusing on amplifying progress made at the grassroots level through linkages to formal institutions.

The adoption of attitudes, habits, and behaviors needed for healthy financial decision-making is an essential first step in preparing individuals to be consumers of financial services. But just because households regularly save money or understand the risks of microloans does not necessarily mean that they are ready to evaluate and take-up formal financial services on their own. To be effective, financial inclusion interventions for those living in extreme poverty, at the base of the pyramid, need to both foster financial capability and facilitate healthy linkages to financial institutions.

Recognizing this need, Village Enterprise is working to establish linkages between our Business Savings Groups (BSGs, our version of VSLAs) and formal financial institutions. However, as we have learned, linking our BSGs to the right financial institution is easier said than done. We have found that creating healthy linkages is a multi-step process, rather than a one-time event.

> Posted by Hannah McCandless, Program Support Associate, Village Enterprise

Through its one-year graduation program, Village Enterprise provides business and savings training, access to savings groups, seed capital, and mentoring to rural East Africans living in extreme poverty. In part one of this series, Village Enterprise reflects on some of the learnings gained through these interventions, focusing on facilitating behavior and attitude change to increase financial capability.

In a recent CFI blog post, Robert Stone of Savings at the Frontier reflects that technology can serve as a valuable tool, but not a silver bullet, in the quest to improve well-being through expanding financial capability. As tech-thinker Kentaro Toyama notes, “Even in a world of abundant technology, there is no social change without change in people.” Toyama’s words resonate with Village Enterprise’s approach to financial inclusion for the extreme poor. Stone argues that effective change will occur when interventions that create change in people are connected to systems that amplify the effectiveness of these changes. This is a good description of what Village Enterprise is about.

Village Enterprise’s graduation program instills behavior change in people by providing a package of supports that enable them to move forward: access to savings networks, an asset transfer, skills training, and mentoring. Then, we capitalize on these changes by connecting participants to formal financial services. The combination of these services dramatically increases financial capability–the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors needed to facilitate healthy financial decision making–in the extreme poor.

Leonardo Tibaquira Morales, Product Manager at Accion, leads a training for workshop participants who work with pensions

Traditional financial education programs have, at best, a minimal impact on the financial capability of recipients. At least that’s what the research tells us. Still, the vast majority of time and energy contributed towards improving financial capability around the world is channeled through traditional methods. I had the opportunity to take a closer look – and contribute to – one country that is energetically trying to improve financial capability: Colombia.

The Colombian government recognizes that the average level of financial literacy and financial capability in the country is low, especially among rural and low income communities (as a joint-study by CAF and others across several South American countries demonstrates) and that the programs implemented thus far have been insufficient to address the issue. But, the country is poised for change.

This week and next, three Accion staff—myself, Pablo Antón Díaz, and Kathleen Yaworsky — are working with about a thousand other people to make progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) during UNLEASH Lab 2017. As the website exclaims, “The first UNLEASH event is held when talents from all over the world come to Denmark for nine days to create real, scalable solutions to the Sustainable Development Goals.” Before I left, a friend of mine asked what the goals have to do with my work, since they don’t explicitly include financial inclusion. The answer is quite simply that financial inclusion is an enabler of the SDGs. We encourage and advance financial inclusion so that people’s lives can be better in many of the ways the SDGs address – from education to health care to housing.

UNLEASH Lab 2017 is an audacious experiment that brings together people from 130 countries who work in academia, health, education, economic development, infrastructure development, city planning, and more. The idea is that with adequate brainpower and resources, a group of people like this can move the needle on the SDGs. The events team, with support from Deloitte, Dalberg, and others, and drawing on input from more than 200 “knowledge and talent partners”, has loaded the agenda with inspirational speeches, team-based design workshops, and competitions. At the end of the event, some of the better ideas that emerge will receive funding. And apparently Ashton Kutcher will be there too for a little extra star power.

Imagine a country unlike any you have ever seen – a mountainous land without Starbucks, where pop stars sing praises of the king, and men wear skirts with knee socks. You might be tempted to relegate the country to the category of charming or exotic. But that would be a disservice to Bhutan, which presents itself as kind, intelligent and ready to participate in the modern world.

Founding Sponsor

Credit Suisse is a founding sponsor of the Center for Financial Inclusion. The Credit Suisse Group Foundation looks to its philanthropic partners to foster research, innovation and constructive dialogue in order to spread best practices and develop new solutions for financial inclusion.

Note

The views and opinions expressed on this blog, except where otherwise noted, are those of the authors and guest bloggers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Financial Inclusion or its affiliates.